Catching up

Back from holiday (since Monday in fact, but I've been busy), and lots of interesting things have happened:

The Adpocalypse (Bubblegeneration) is upon us. Two and a half million people (RoughType) have decided they'd rather not bear the nuisance costs of poorly-targeted online ads and downloaded a simple Firefox ad-blocking extension. It took two days (Adverlab) for YouTube's new InVideo ads to suffer the same fate from another Firefox extension, TubeStop. Further research via Paidcontent shows that most UK DVR owners skip most ads (and also buy fewer DVDs). This looks to me like the moment when a behaviour that was limited to the early technology adopters (alright, geeks) went mainstream and the mass audience realised it could turn its collective back on irrelevant interruptions.

Second Life has its own stock exchange (TechCrunch) - perhaps the ultimate emerging market opportunity, though for my money the interesting commercial opportunities are within Eve Online (long term) and WoW (short term) and what the metaverses need is a interworld exchange for businesses whose assets exist within the various virtual worlds.